MEETING: The first step will be for us to meet and go over your goals and concerns of your property. We will look at if you already have hunters on your property, what success they have had or not, and really get a feel for what your goals are. This is also a great time for us to get to know each other and build our future relationship that will be built on trust.

PROPERTY WALK THROUGH: In order for us to get a complete understanding, we will have to do a walk through of your property. This is where we will take notes to help create the proper management plan. Our focus here will be to locate deer bedding, travel corridors, ideal treestand locations, safety boundaries and buffers, access areas and potentially meet with neighbors. We will also take a look into your forest stands and at your crops and potentially create areas that can deter deer, such as your crops or home landscape, through designing solutions other than hunting like food plots, forest, field and grass managements etc.

Develop a Property Management Plan: Every property is different and every property and land owner have different needs. Once we evaluate your property, we can get a rough idea if there is a cultural carrying capacity problem or an overpopulation. If there is an overpopulation (too many deer for the area) we can create a plan to reduce the deer herd densities. If the deer have been overpopulated long term, we can design a plan that can bring back your property to its full potential. Removal of invasive and nonnative species of plants and grasses can be replaced with forbs and shrubbery which can help grow the health of all animal species while giving them areas to live and thrive, rather than concentrating on your landscape, crops and more.

The creation of this property management will include property objectives, designing of a property map, herd management including an inventory, desired goals, and management recommendations. We will also look at a habitat management plan by taking inventory of your conifer and hardwoods, areas of mixed forests, soft mast orchards, early successional and old field habitats. We will overlay and outline the acres of pasture, cropland as well as non-hunt-able acres and discuss the goals of each area of your property and create habitat recommendations accordingly.

Included in the property management will be hunter management. MAWS hunters are 100% insured and required to pass a background check, have zero hunting violations, provide references, pass an interview, complete in house training and pass our annual shooter qualifications for each weapon that hunter is using. We prefer to use our own hunters as they are trained in hunting pressure, field judging techniques and are trustworthy individuals. We will work with previous hunters on the property moving forward, but they will be required to sign an ethics forms as well as sign the property management plan and rules and regulations set forth. We are unable to provide sound management as a whole if we cannot control as much as possible and we have found that hunter management is the #1 thing we truly can control by using our own hunters.

Execute the Plan: Executing the plan is a beautiful thing. This stage can take as little as a week or two to complete or over the course of a couple months depending on the land owners cooperation and ability/time to meet put forth the initial efforts. Our managers and hunters will complete the tasks they are assigned and most importantly collect information from your deer herd through the use of trail cameras, observations and scouting tactics. From there, our hunters will follow the management plan and conduct what is needed to meet your overall goals.

Collect and Analyze Data: Here is the most important part of the entire project. Once we have a management plan complete, our hunters and managers get to work. We MUST collect data in order to determine our success. Data from deer harvests are collected including the deers weight, their jawbone to age the deer, the scoring of any bucks, lactation rates, collecting and analyze any fetus that may be present in a late season doe harvest and more. Each hunter is required to complete an observation log as well as a harvest log. Through all of this data collection, we can monitor the health of your deer herd. These numbers can let us know if our program is successful or not. It can let us know if we need to make any amendments and if we need to focus our attention on other means on the property. Overall, this is the most important part of the program and is why we like using our own hunters mostly as it, again, is much easier to control and ensure.

Additionally we will complete a year end report for your property. This will keep you updated with all the information we have gathered through the year. The year end report can provide you with approximate crop damage we have saved you, impact of our program, future outlook to the program and any changes that we recommend. We like to work under a 3-5 year contract to provide the plan time to work to it’s full potential. We have found through most of our properties that after 3 years, many of our landowners and property managers, have extended or renewed our contracts for additional years consistently.